Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, a Senate Intelligence Committee member who had previously warned that the government was collecting too much data on U.S. citizens, on Thursday charged that the government collection of Verizon phone records was a "massive invasion of Americans' privacy."

Wyden, a high-ranking Democratic senator on the committee, said he had been concerned about such surveillance for a long time but continues to be barred by Senate rules from discussing many of the details that he learned in classified intelligence briefings.

"However,
I believe that when law-abiding Americans call their friends, who they
call, when they call, and where they call from is private information," Wyden said. "Collecting this data about every single phone call that every American
makes every
day would be a massive invasion of Americans’ privacy."

In a separate comment on his Twitter feed, Wyden also noted that James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, had assured him in a March hearing that the National Security Agency was not collecting data on millions of Americans -- an assurance that Wyden now appears to find suspect.

The Guardian newspaper from Great Britain on Wednesday night revealed the existence of a four-page court order ordering Verizon to turn over the phone records of its customers who made calls from the U.S. to foreign countries or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

The information sought by the government did not include the contents of the calls.

Wyden has repeatedly expressed concerns about the extent of government surveillance following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the passage of the Patriot Act, which was used as the legal basis for the obtaining of the phone records.

Added Wyden in his statement:

"The
American people have a right to know whether their government thinks
that the sweeping, dragnet surveillance that has been alleged in this
story is allowed under the law and whether it is actually being
conducted. Furthermore, they have a
right to know whether the program that has been described is actually
of value in preventing attacks. Based on several years of oversight, I
believe that its value and effectiveness remain unclear.”

Wyden spokesman Tom Towslee said the senator was not immediately giving interviews on the subject. But on Wyden's Twitter feed, he made several more statements: